Sidetracks

The main theme of the current week has been looking for focus and inspiration for my project, the Recombinable Vector Graphics library. This has not been without some results, detailed elsewhere; and some side effects.

While looking for Isotype examples, I was browsing through fulltable.com , a site that holds some essential images, hidden in its dated and byzantine hierarchy:

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I have found the magazine Dot Dot Dot # 16 that i purchased last saturday to be very inspiring. It is very much a (maga)zine I wish I’d made, containing a jumble of different essays on themes ranging from the history of screen savers through jpg compression to literary criticism. The oblique and anti-hard-sell approach is fascinating, and it is actually hard to tell what the magazine is about by leafing through it. Or by looking at it’s website. Visiting the site of Dexter Sinister who are in some part responsible for Dot Dot Dot might be enlightening.

A particularly interesting piece in the ‘zine is an excerpt from Clifford Irving’s upcoming biography, a story with interesting yarn-like qualities, detailing, among other equally interesting things, the author’s writing of a fake Howard Hughes biography that got him jailed and chased by a Mormon hitman. I was actually more or less unaware of the character before, but now he seems like someone to check up on. As seems Nabokov, on who there was a critical essay.

You can’t help liking that they sell their standardized ads priced by contrast – more contrast, more expensive. The cheapest ad is thus a white text on a 10% gray background (although in issue # 16, everything is inverted, so the cheapest ad is black text on 90% black).

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Then, some moving images. I finally managed, after fiddling with a command line utility, to unpack the Skrotnisse DVD I downloaded some while ago. An amazing and slightly disturbing animation by Jan Lööf that aired on finnish television in the nineties.

The blog today and tomorrow occasionally has some very nice things, like this performance called ATOM that recently was in Berlin.